Joy is a mindfuck, because in modern culture "you have to be happy". It’s what you learned at your home, in the advertisements, movies, series, school. Do everything to have success and be happy. Study this college, go to work 10 hours a day in this corporation that it’s killing life on planet earth, get marriage, buy a car, buy a house, go to travel, and then you will be happy.
Be happy.
It seems to be the biggest goal in modern culture. “At the end of the day I want to be happy, peaceful with each other”. To “make it” happen you might learn to suppress your anger, your sadness, your fear because they are bad feelings. “Good vibes only”.
It’s a mindfuck because at the same time that you grow up listening to the mantra "you should be glad" there is other information that is totally the opposite "no, don't be too glad".
If you investigate a little deeper, you will soon realize that if you’re too joyful, you’re perceived as:
• childish,
• not professional, or at least
• suspicious, naive.
This is the Degenerative Map of Joy.
Because you learned to force your feelings, you learned to pretend, to block, they become unconscious. And it’s at this moment that your gremling takes place.
Because of the mixed messages that you learned about joy, your system will not be used to the pure archetypal force of joy as a resource. That is why joy is mostly unconscious and serves the hidden purposes of your Gremlin.
The biggest part of the research is about finding and healing the blocks and stories and building up a new inner structure able to hold conscious joy. This goes through practice.
What are the qualities of Joy as a Feeling that serves you?
What’s in the way for you to use Joy as a resource?
How can you access your joy of life?
In the research Team that Julia Neumann and Gabriela held space some of the discoveries relate the Degenerative Map of Joy were:
The Immediate Pleasure
One of the most efficient strategies to avoid feeling pain is to look for immediate pleasure that brings a high dopamine spike, such as: scrolling on instagram, leaving and entering apps, games, sex, chocolate, drugs, series, binge-watching makeover videos on youtube.
The pitfall of dopamine spikes is that your system becomes addicted. After a dopamine spike your brain is flooded with euphoria and a sense of relief. A while later, this dopamine line drops drastically, beyond the natural line, which generates a feeling of tiredness, drunkenness.
As a result, their bodies gradually lose the possibility of experiencing contentment when doing things that generate dopamine in a more stable and constant way, such as reading a book, spending a day at the pool with friends, enjoying the sunset, and having a deep and intimate conversation with your partner. It's like life loses color, and you're always looking for more and more intensity to feel alive.
Your gremlin has clever ways of blackmailing, manipulating and convincing you to get distracted in this cycle so that you can avoid responsibility for your life and become a victim of not having enough possibilities to change. An example is your gremling taking a task, making it bigger than it is, adding layers and layers of complexity, until you have enough reason to be distracted: "oh, I'll just take a look at this message, then I'll finish this." That is the seed for procrastination.
Yesterday, after holding space for one person, I felt 70% joy. I watched the cells in my body vibrate, like when I take a bath in a waterfall. It was a small gap in which I was present with this feeling of contemplation and appreciation for the extraordinary and archetypal space that was created.
Soon after I observed the movement of my gremlin, almost as if taking this vibration from my cells and eating it and then I observed this pure joy turning into "how amazing, I transformed this person's life, I helped him transform, let's move on to the next task of the day. Transform more people". i noticing the adrenaline in my body, my heart started to beat faster
Most of the time when I say "I just feel glad" I've realized it's an immediate action from my box, like saying "hi, what's up?".
I noticed this when my partner sent me an audio sharing about the first space he was going to offer and I automatically wrote "I feel happy that he is going to create this space".
When I tried to say the information of joy this came out: "I feel joy because I have been following your journey to support spaces and I witnessed your shares of how terrifying this was for you. I celebrate this step towards something that used to be a resistance".
Wow, how much information filtered through my box.
I was in an etb training this weekend and I noticed when I first got there I was experiencing emotional joy. I was so excited about being in a new place and meeting new people that I couldn't access any other feeling. I navigated through a mini EHP about it and discovered it was tied to a memory of traveling on a trip with my mom at 5 years old. It was the joy of having one on one connection with her.
At this training while sharing a room with other women I noticed the gremlin joy in the evenings after all the sessions were over and we would come together and share about different fears of the day and then my gremlin would come in and make jokes and I was conscious about what I was doing and it was fun.
I keep noticing the intensity of my bubbly joy that is here also right now, excited about creating, with a slight tendency to be in the future, agitated, restless. I believe it is emotional joy.
I also notice my caution - fear - of feeling joy in the moment as things occur. For example, we put up a bell tent where I live yesterday. It was magical how that came about and how easily we put it up.
From what I recall, my fear was about breaking the tent when jumping around in joy; fear of the carelessness that often comes with joy. I sense how my parent ego sits there watching over my joy in those moments. I sense that this is partly so because what comes up is the child joy, rather than the adult joy. I see it in the others around me, and I feel scared of that.
What are the qualities of Joy as a Feeling that serves you?
What’s in the way for you to use Joy as a resource?
How can you access your joy of life?
The starting point to learn to use your feeling of Joy consciously it’s to go through Gremlin Transformation.
This is an ongoing research. Here it’s some possibilities we learned in The Research Team how you can use consciously your Joy
yesterday I experienced do a kind of “spun” with wood and my hands. I could observe the feeling of joy flowing as I was discovering how to peal the wood, what the best way to use the knife, how to do the hole. I experienced joy as a fuel of discovery and exploration of doing something new. And as the another feelings, I just can feel if I’m present. When I was not present, I was numb and was the moment I broke the wood in the middle and I felt anger that brings me to the presence again. Then I started over and this was the result.
My joy handworking TPP project turned out to be a soap holder for the shower. I had the idea the other morning. So I got driftwood and pumice rock, a very soft airy stone from the volcanoes here where I live.
I started carving the stone and the driftwood yesterday and noticed how my joy was there only occasionally. I caught myself thinking I should finish it now. And so I stopped. I did not want it to be a chore.
This morning I returned to it and I feel joy at the creation.
I notice that I feel more joy carving wood than pumice.
For the last days I joined a chocolate maker visiting the producers of the chocolate beans he uses: An indigenous tribe living close to the Panama border in a reserve. With us was a mother who lost her 7 year old child when her house burned down two years ago.
It turned out to be a 3 day culture to culture experiment with a huge language barrier and high intensity fear on my side since I don‘t speak spanish (the Ngäbe only rarely speak english, mostly their own language and the language of their conquerors - spanish) and we slept in the jungle in wooden huts.
They cope with being pushed into this life far of the next city (aprox. 1h by car) with a humbleness. I did not receive any high intensity joy over the two days with different people. Something like an underlying joy of life though was in every move. I twice heard them say: „The spanish sent us here to die and look how good we survive!“
I felt resentment under sadness and something like an old „shock“ (as high intensity fear) that keeps them contained in surviving and not wanting to go anywhere from there.
I felt these joys (mixed and unmixed):
adrenalin of adventure
the joy of seeing sunrise and sunset
the joy of listening to the song of zicades
the joy of learning about another culture without wanting to show my culture
joy of cooking on fire
joy of harvesting food
adrenalin of searching for tracks of a jaguar in the jungle by night
joy of tropical rain
joy of roadtripping
joy of not understanding any word and being allowed to listen
joy of tasting strange food (there‘s fear and something else I can not name - maybe fear of disgust)
joy of meeting a „soulfriend“ - somebody who resonates a lot with what I notice and the conversation just keeps on rolling
joy of life working out without plan (going non-linear)
Yesterday we had a family meeting about this new kitchen codex, and my youngest who is 6 years old was there but playing off to the side , I assumed not really listening. This morning after breakfast though I found her doing this in the kitchen.
Yesterday while facilitating a PlayFight circle I discovered that conscious joy is a way of accessing the non-linearity of my gremling to make movements in space beyond my box. Conscious joy is the fuel for experimentation and non-linearity.
It was a group of 8 people, all psychologists, with highly intellectual and analytical cases. In a moment, between one exercise and another, many parallel conversations started to happen, trying to analyze all the experiences that were happening (it's just that in froid's theory.... and it started).
In that situation, in a usual way to facilitate I would pause and ask a question or ask you not to go pro mental, make an invitation to experience the physical body. However I felt like exploring "how to use my sword of clarity in a playful and playful way".
The moment I asked myself that question, between one exercise and another, I felt the joy grow in my body and I decided to use it by asking Raissa (my gremling): what game do you propose so that these people can experience reality not verbal.
She brought me something that my box completely fried. I decided to propose a non-verbal game in which from that moment on our communication would only be through the body, including me explaining the exercises. It was really fun the countless ways I could explore my body and how to land communication beyond words.
The shift that happened in space was incredible. People began to surrender to the exercises, they began to access their feelings. In the end, one of the discoveries we made as a group is that unconscious joy can be almost like a euphoria that disconnects us from ourselves and takes us to mind and agitation. One participant said "I found that I've been anesthetizing any and all feelings talking and talking, analyzing, thank you for proposing this game because I could access another dimension of what it is to be human"
I am researching the question: how joy and playfulness can empower my everyday life, What does the energy of conscious joy enable me
I also found that my parental ego state still has many judgments that "gremling is bad, it's wrong", "you can't use her, it's your dark world".
What I was able to experience and recognize in this experience is that I often do not experience ecstasy and do not allow myself to use the energy of joy to get out of the usualness of my box and access non-linearity (which is my gremling) due to the parental ego state .
And in this state of parental ego I found an emotional fear that I'm going to make a process, I feel afraid of using this joy as an inventiveness, of using this joy to access my gremling, and I get attention. Because when I "came attention" I was abused or only received praising
The creative spark is a process that allows us to solve seemingly impossible problems. The chemical burst of pleasure we feel when genuine knowledge transmission takes place [for example, from your Bright Principles or your Archetypal Lineage] occurs from the creation of new neural pathways. These are connections between two points that were previously unconnected. Jokes are one of the most pure examples of this neural creation event; most humor is based on two ideas coming together in a new way - puns, rhymes, double meanings, etc. are examples of this. The chemical rush we get from sudden neural connections in jokes is so intensely pleasurable that we laugh out loud. This kind of humor and joy in learning is a huge part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. If people are laughing, they are learning. True learning is a joy because it is an act of creation.
But there are two kinds of joy. One is characterized by lightheartedness and the other is marked by fierce engagement and deep concentration. Both give pleasure by increasing connectedness and complexity in the neural systems of learners. There needs to be an interaction between abstract (spirit) and concrete (physical) worlds of knowledge for this kind of complexity to develop fully. Without closing the loop between abstract knowledge and reality, and without making connections between different ideas and areas of knowledge, true learning cannot occur.
A focus on linear, abstract, declarative knowledge alone not only fails to create complex connectivity but damages the mind. We are biologically punished for this destructive behavior with a neurochemical rush of lethargy and discomfort that most people call boredom. Extended periods of this affects a person's mental health, resulting in bouts of rage, depression, and worse. In centralized knowledge institutions today, this illness is called 'misbehavior' or 'misconduct'. Without the spark of creation in your neural system, the mind-body system stagnates and falls apart, affecting no only your ability to learn but also your health and relationships as well, leading to increasingly destructive behaviors.
Experiments
"The question is not whether you practice or not.
It's about what you practice."
The kown can only create the known.
Only the unknown can create other results.
But how can I use what I don't know?
Become an Experimenter:
Matrix Code CONSJOY.01
Which map of joy is in your bodies alive?
Prepare your space so you are undistrubed for 15mins.
Go into first position with your gremlin on the leash and your sword in your hand.
Scan your 5 bodies:
Which map of joy is alive in each single body?
Write your findings in your Beep!-Book. This is your starting point for the experiment.
Now repeat this experiment with different people around you (friends, family, collegues, foreigners, ...).
What do you notice?
Share your findings with your team.
Matrix Code CONSJOYx.02
Excitement
When you feel excitement seperate the joy from the fear and look at the informations that fear and joy have for you seperately.
You might need to go through an unmixing process first to untangle the mixed emotions in your heart.
Mixing joy and fear is a decision from when you were very young. This decision is fuel for the creation of the fantasy worlds.
Share your findings, especially
with your team.
Matrix Code CONSJOYx.03
Numbing Joy
How do you numb joy?
Which sentences do pop up in you?
Matrix Code CONSJOYx.04
Joy vs. immediate pleasure
This experiment can only be done when you feel pain in one or more bodies.
Notice how you use joy to numb the sensation of pain.
How do you create joy?
How does it work in your bodies?
What happens after joy arises?
Matrix Code CONSJOYx.05
Parent Ego state controls
Collect the sentences your parent ego states uses to stop you from feeling gremlin or adult joy.
Matrix Code CONSJOY.06
Informations of your joy
Matrix Code CONSJOY.07
Uncentered joy
Open a door for us to cellebrate your experimenting.
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